IT IS a split second that lasts forever. Midway through the first quarter at Etihad Stadium last Saturday, an Essendon and a Brisbane Lions player approach the ball from opposite and equidistant directions. My eye is caught by the Essendon player. Though unidentified in my memory, in that moment he stands for any and every player in the competition.

He hesitates.

It is only for a split second, but in that fraction, a footballing lifetime's worth of choices passes through his mind. His instinct, training and obligation is to go for the ball, of course, but how?

If he goes head-first, he might get it, but he might also get collected in the head, in which case he might get a free kick, but he might not; the AFL is unclear on this. He might also end up with a very sore head.

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He could go front-on, but risks shirt-fronting his opponent, perhaps giving away a free kick, perhaps not. He could turn and go with hip-and-shoulder, but he would be responsible for the consequences to his opponent; match review panel and tribunal have made that clear.

This much he knows: he must go low. The coaches all emphasise it. It's all about technique, they say. But if his opponent goes lower, then, relatively, he will have gone high, with all the drama that entails.

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He can't slide. At least, he can slide, at his own risk. He might get a free kick, but he might also get reported. Lindsay Thomas, he remembers, got both.

He can't dive on the ball; almost certainly, others would dive on him, and the crowd would bawl for ''ball'', and he would be penalised.

He has to balance two duties, one a commitment to his team, the other of care to a fellow professional. He can't go, but he can't NOT go.

This is already a very long split second. During it, perhaps, his opponent gets to the ball first, fractionally. Then what? Some form of contact is inevitable and obligatory. He cannot bump; that box already has been ticked. He must tackle; but how? Where?

Higher, the shoulders and arms, the better to pin the ball to his opponent? But if the other player manages to squirm down and out of the tackle, the tackler risks conceding a free kick for high contact. Colloquially, it is known as ''around the Selwood'', otherwise an ''eagling''. The umpire has no choice; it is the rules.

Lower, around the waist? Then his opponent will free his arms and loose off a handball, rendering the tackle ineffective. Lower still, and he risks giving away a tripping free.

Ideally, he will stick the tackle, perfectly. But even this is fraught with risk. If under the force of the tackle, his opponent collapses, it might be a push in the back. If in applying the tackle, he slings him to the ground, that might also be a free.

If, in the necessarily hectic act of tackling, he pins his opponent's arms, and as they fall does not release them, and his opponent hits his head on the ground, that might be a report. It was last year's pet sanction. Jack Trengove was given three games to reflect on it.

He cannot pin his arms, but he cannot NOT pin his arms. That would be a failure of technique.

He could simply let his opponent get the ball first, obviating the second-guessing and leaving it to his opponent to do all this instantaneous synthesis and calculation. Some small forwards opt to dwell this way. But, somehow, that is seen as a failure of ethics. What do the coaches say? ''When it's your turn to go, you have to go.''

This split second is now an eternity, but is still only a split second long. And that's the point. In an ideal world, he would gather the ball, break or evade the tackle and onwards ho. Sometimes this is so. Sometimes - three times as often as 10 years ago - it is not.

Sometimes, frequently, a player has to make a complex and deliberate choice, but with no time for deliberation. It cannot be denied that some players take advantage of his random dynamic consciously to inflict harm, masking it as accident. Human nature is dark.

But it is also true that in a sport of constant collisions, accidents happen, and try as the AFL might, players cannot all be made to fit into a stylised and idealised version of the game, and that by forever changing rules and interpretations in this quest, it is only adding to the clutter and confusion in the minds of fans, umpires and players, until even good ones cannot always be sure whether they are coming or going …